Service providers have the ability to provide their end customers today with a complete Disaster Recovery as a Service solution using Double Take Cloud Protection and Recovery provides which provides low-risk, near-zero downtime DR-as-a-Service (DRaaS) for organizations of all sizes. Its usage-based pricing and compliance with SLAs and RPO/RTO guidelines make it just the solution the market needs today. Here are 5 advantages for the DRaaS every End Customer should think of when considering a DR solution:

1. Reduced Disaster Recovery Costs

if you currently have a disaster recovery site in place, you are already familiar with the high costs associated with such an infrastructure. Beyond the unavoidable investments in replication software and the required software licenses for servers, storage and security, there are a number of significant additional costs involved. Most of these additional costs are effectively eliminated by using DRaaS through a service provider:

Owning your own building or leasing space for your secondary datacenter

Alternatively, leasing a cabinet or cage at a datacenter provider

Monthly costs associated with power, cooling and Internet bandwidth at the secondary site

Purchase or lease of servers, storage and network equipment at the secondary site

Travel to and from datacenters or on-site staff at the secondary datacenter

2. Reduced Complexity

Building and maintaining a secondary DR site can be both costly and complex. If all of that infrastructure could be eliminated then the administration, upgrade requirements, maintenance contracts and more could be eliminated as well.

3. Achieve Interoperability

So many DR solutions are based on replication/synchronization to/from only one specific hypervisor, or may be restricted to use with one model physical server. Some solutions are even application specific. In contrast, DRaaS solutions are available that are hardware, hypervisor and application independent, so you can protect servers across different hypervisors, replicate data between dissimilar storage systems, etc.

4. Save Time

By reducing complexity and simplifying the disaster recovery solution with a single provider, IT groups will save a tremendous amount of time as compared to managing their own disaster recovery site. Additionally, if you have yet to deploy your own DR site, you’ll be able to deploy DRaaS within hours or days (depending on your number of servers) as compared to the weeks or months it can take to deploy your own site.

5. Provide a Comprehensive DR Solution

In many cases companies who implement their own DR site have to do it in phases and only protect the most critical servers first (In many cases, never even being able to protect all servers). Because DRaaS is so much easier and more affordable, many companies are able to protect all of their servers (physical and virtual), providing a complete DR solution.

When it comes to cloud services, every survey on the subject reports that cloud adoption is growing and will keep growing. The majority of organizations already have breakout budgets for cloud, and even those are expected to grow. The few organizations that haven’t adopted cloud yet? Experts say just wait, they will.

Obviously, the cloud is great for business. Cost savings, better performance and simplified operations… what’s not to like? The data loss and downtime that traditionally come with migrations and the risk that comes with having all customer’s eggs in one virtual basket. In order truly make cloud services an asset and not a liability, Partners will have to protect customer’s virtual workloads running in the cloud. Otherwise, customers are at extreme risk for losing time, money and data in an outage or emergency. What’s more, if customers are backing up virtual and Cloud servers to physical servers, they have then failed to remove the risks inherent to physical servers.

Whether customers have already adopted cloud and virtual servers, or they are planning to in the near future, they should keep in mind that in order to have a solid business continuity plan, partners will have to provide them with an HA/DR solution that is created specifically for Cloud and virtual servers. Double Take software replicates workloads in real time and are hardware, software, platform, OS and storage agnostic. Plus, it’s affordable and easy to use. Double Take software moves workloads on virtual and Cloud servers to and from any combination of physical, virtual or Cloud servers in real time. That means customers can have any infrastructure they want, now or in the future, and they will still have a reliable means of keeping customer’s business running no matter what.

Cloud and virtual technology is a great investment, but don’t risk customer’s ROI by overlooking purpose-built HA/DR software, or by overestimating the old technology you already have. Real-time replication software protects everything on customer’s servers – up to the second – so all of customer’s IT investments and assets are always safe.